A Life Both Blessed and Bruised

After a tumultuous ride, Rick Hendrick sits atop the world of NASCARat least for now.

Today, Rick Hendrick is driving his own car, a new black Chevrolet Tahoe with five of those remote-control door openers clipped to the driver’s-side sun visor.

One of them opens the door of a private garage beneath his office at Hendrick Motorsports near Charlotte, North Carolina. He pulls into the little garage and squeezes the Tahoe between a pair of pristine No. 48 Lowe’s-sponsored Chevrolet race cars. Hidden away here, the $150,000 cars are surprise gifts for Hendrick’s driver, Jimmie Johnson, and his crew chief, Chad Knaus, for winning their second straight NASCAR Sprint Cup championship.

Hendrick runs the most successful NASCAR team in modern racing history. His drivers are Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Casey Mears, and the newest member, Dale Earnhardt Jr. He’s racing’s equivalent of the brass ring. Earnhardt landed at Hendrick for the 2008 season after his much-publicized fallout with stepmother Teresa Earnhardt.

Hendrick turns 59 in July. His hair is thinning, his belly is not, and he never seems to get quite enough sleep. He moves and talks with gravity and deliberation, measuring every word.

Hendrick Motorsports’ headquarters are on the second floor of a new office complex next to the race shops. Although Rick Hendrick has a big glassed-in corner office, he prefers to do business at the head of a glass table with a half-dozen chairs in a little room next to the kitchen, where he sits behind a phone that has a lot of lines. His cell phone vibrates nonstop.

Downstairs, beneath his office, there are a half-dozen race cars in an area that is open to the public, and it takes him 15 minutes to get from the door through the fans to a waiting golf cart. They want autographs and photos and a handshake, and there is one skinny, pimply kid who has waited all day for a chance to tell somebody, anybody, that he will sweep floors at Hendrick Motorsports if they will just give him a chance. That’s exactly how Steve Letarte got his foot in Hendrick’s door. He is now Jeff Gordon’s crew chief.

Hendrick also owns the Hendrick Automotive Group, with 65 new-car dealerships in nine states. Total revenue for 2007: $4.3 billion.

That his life would involve cars was never in question. Born in Warrenton, North Carolina, in 1949 and raised on his father’s small tobacco farm just over the state line in Virginia, Hendrick was 13 when he started drag-racing a cobbled-together 1931 Chevy he and his father, Papa Joe, bought for $250. By age 23, he had become sales manager of a new-car dealership.

In 1976, he bought a sagging Chevrolet dealership in Bennettsville, South Carolina, with the promise that if he could turn the sad little store around, GM wouldn’t forget it. At 26 (he was the youngest Chevy dealer in the country), he made it profitable, and GM helped him buy City Chevrolet, which remains the heart of his Charlotte-based operation. You might also recall that City Chevrolet was a “sponsor” of Tom Cruise’s car in the 1990 film Days of Thunder, a movie that resulted from an offhand suggestion Hendrick made to new friend Cruise and some associates.

For a refugee from Tobacco Road, Hendrick has succeeded mightily at his job, as well as his hobby, NASCAR racing. He has seven NASCAR Cup championships, second only to Petty Enterprises’ 10. He created the template for the successful multicar team, where shared resources and an economy of scale make Hendrick Motorsports the dominant player in NASCAR, with 18 victories in 36 races in 2007.

Hendrick drivers show respect and affection for the boss, and so do the people at his dealerships. He visits all the stores each year and shakes hands with every employee—all 6000 of them.

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